Mainframe 2.0 Features

Mainframe 2.0 has the following main features:

CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA MSM)

Delivers simplified acquisition, installation, and deployment capabilities using a common z/OS-based web application delivered through a browser-based UI. CA MSM includes the following services:

Product Acquisition Service (PAS): Facilitates the acquisition of our mainframe products and services, including product base installation packages and program temporary fixes (PTFs). This service integrates the inventory of products available on your system with CA Support, providing a seamless environment for managing and downloading software and fixes onto your system.
Software Installation Service (SIS): Facilitates the installation and maintenance of our mainframe products in the software inventory of the driving system. This service enables you to browse and manage the software inventory using a web interface, and automates tasks for products that use SMP/E to manage installation. You can browse downloaded software packages, and browse and manage one or more consolidated software inventories (CSIs) on the driving system.
Software Deployment Service (SDS): Facilitates the deployment of CA Technologies mainframe products from the software inventory of the driving system. This service enables you to deploy installed products that are policy-driven with a set of appropriate transport mechanisms across a known topology. The enterprise system topology can include shared DASD environments, networked environments, and z/OS systems. Policies represent a combination of metadata input and user-supplied input. Metadata input identifies the component parts of a product. User-supplied input identifies the deployment criteria, such as where it goes and what it is named.
Software Configuration Service (SCS): Facilitates the mainframe products configuration from the software inventory of the driving system to the targeted z/OS mainframe operating system. The SCS guides you through the configuration creation process, and through the manual steps to implement the configuration. In addition, the SCS includes an address space communications service running on each targeted z/OS system.

Electronic Software Delivery (ESD)

Enables you to get our products from an FTP server. We have improved this process so that you no longer need to build a tape to install the product.

Best Practices Management

Integrates with IBM Health Checker for z/OS to verify that deployed software follows our best practices. The health checks continually monitor the system and software to provide feedback on whether the software continues to be configured optimally.

Best Practices Guide

Provides best practices for product installation and configuration.

Active and Heartbeat Event Management through CA OPS/MVS EMA

CA Technologies mainframe products can automatically communicate both active status events and heartbeat events to CA OPS/MVS in a consistent manner. The enabling technology for this feature is through a generic event API call that CA OPS/MVS provides to the other products so that they can communicate events to CA OPS/MVS.

Two versions of this API call are provided to support this initiative:

An active status event API call that allows other products to generate events for the CA OPS/MVS EMA System State Manager (SSM) component when they are starting, up, stopping, or down.
A heartbeat API call that allows other CA Technologies products to communicate a normal, warning, or problem overall health status and reasoning to CA OPS/MVS EMA on a regular interval.

After a CA Technologies product begins generating heart beat events for CA OPS/MVS, CA OPS/MVS can also react to the lack of a heart beat event from another CA Technologies product address space, treating this as an indication that there is either a potential problem with the CA Technologies product address space, or there is a larger system-level problem.

SSM is a built-in feature of CA OPS/MVS that uses an internal relational data framework to proactively monitor and manage started tasks, online applications, subsystems, JES initiators, and other z/OS resources including your CA Technologies mainframe products. SSM compares the current state of online systems, hardware devices, and the other resources with their desired state, and then automatically makes the necessary corrections when a resource is not in its desired state. This provides proactive and reactive state management of critical resources. As previously noted, SSM is particularly interested in receiving active status events consistently from all CA Technologies products when they are starting, up, stopping, or down. Without this consistent type of events, SSM must maintain separate rules in CA OPS/MVS for each product unique messages that are associated with starting and stopping.

Note: For additional information about the CA Mainframe 2.0 initiative, see http://ca.com//mainframe2.